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How Trust Builds Businesses
Trust: The Underlying Economy
Your income depends on revenue, and these revenue sources rest on the trust that your business will provide an expected result. Even if you’re the best for the job, if someone trusts a competitor more, the competitor will win the business you deserve.
It may sound extreme, but trust forms the root of most daily transactions. You trust your local grocer to provide healthy produce, your bank to process your balance dutifully, and your doctor to properly assess your health, among other everyday trusts.
Overlooking Trust in Business
The economy of trust is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of business. Mistrust is so common today that people often confuse what they can and do trust. For instance, even if your service is superior to a competitor’s, what if your competitor has a more polished online presence?
Customers will base their trust around the visible results, choosing the option they find most reliable. With trustworthy packaging, customers can rest easy, knowing the business with proven results will deliver. Real trust is earned, and without it, people can’t see past the packaging.
Celebrity Endorsements vs. Customer Reviews: The Authenticity Factor
Authenticity wins business, and customers prefer other customer reviews over endorsements from pop icons. Contrary to popular belief, celebrity endorsements are viewed similarly to ordinary customer reviews. People see celebrities as “other people,” even if they charge more per word. Recommendations from familiar and trusted individuals weigh more.
The high cost of celebrity endorsements usually yields fewer results compared to investing equal value and effort in generating better reviews from actual customers. With the rise of web 2.0 technologies like social media and blogging, celebrities have lost their attention monopoly. The internet is brimming with opinions, and the attention economy has transformed into the trust and opinion economy, all due to trust and, more importantly, misaligned trust.
To establish a winning business, understanding why people are inclined to share their opinions so freely and what would make them want to share a good opinion about you is crucial. And the answers to both are intertwined with trust.
Truth, Transparency, Trust, and Turmoil
The concept of an “Attention Economy” has recently gained traction, especially among digital businesses, modeling revenue around effectively harnessing consumer attention. However, attention is just one component of good business.
FTX had everyone’s attention but faltered due to mistrust stemming from previous industry failures and proven intentional fraud by their founder. So why did many overlook the apparent foul play? People trusted and mistrusted the wrong things. FTX is just one example of how trust impacts businesses.
Defending misinformation is not inherently wrong when necessary. However, most business-related lies, driven primarily by profit, are unnecessary and wrong. Navigating through customer mistrust and lack of transparency can be challenging, as mistrust can deteriorate ideal situational deals. If your business is trustworthy and transparent but still struggles, then it may be time to reevaluate your packaging, as that’s what the customer is blaming. Mistrust induces turmoil, which can break businesses.
Digital Trust
If your business is honest and outshines competitors, you’re a good word away from earning more business. Reviews reflect times when your business upheld its offer, and displaying these reviews online transparently will bolster your reputation. Motivating people to review you is challenging in a distracting digital world, where people have learned to reflexively ignore certain prompts, especially from businesses trying to engage with them.
To achieve more reviews and to emphasize their importance, consider linking to a platform like Review Card to cultivate authentic feedback.
If your business operates honestly and your customers trust you, then eliminating any form of friction is your only barrier.
Strategy for Truthful Marketing
To avoid losing an ideal customer, you need to earn their trust. Pushy, vague, and misleading ads will shatter a customer’s trust. Transparency allows people to learn more about your quality of business, and achieving transparency often requires letting someone else do the talking.
Studies have shown that customer experiences and celebrity endorsements hold equal weight from a potential buyer’s perspective. However, negative reviews can inflict more damage to a business than a celebrity speaking ill of a product.
Authentic Reviews: The True Winner
Authentic reviews always prevail. The more you accumulate, the better your chances of conveying the truth to a customer, earning their trust, and securing a satisfied customer. The journey to earning begins with conducting honest business and ideally concludes with a good, authentic review.
Building a Review Pipeline
To walk the road between conducting honest business and acquiring authentic reviews, building a review pipeline is essential.
